Archive for death

while happiness isn’t static (i.e. one is not always the same level of happy), the actions involved in becoming happy can be routine. think of why one might have a favourite ice cream, why a junkie needs the dope, or why a man might make love to the same woman his whole life. this kind of happiness may ebb with repetition (marginal utility), or may not (inelasticity). often, we hope that the stoner grows bored of the high, and that the man stays faithful; unfortunately, that’s not usually the case in either situation!

pardon the digression.

—

When I was six, we used to live in a compound which had over a hundred little houses. I use ‘houses’ here loosely. Our house was a two bedroom-one bath affair, and like all the other houses was build out of what I can only imagine was several layers of cardboard, held together with plaster. It was big enough for me to play in, but… did I mention I was six? And not a big, or fat, six year old was I. In retrospect, it was tiny. So were most of the houses in this compound.

It wasn’t The Ritz. To sum up my family’s financial situation, that year my brother went to school on loaned money.

Here’s the crazy thing… this compound we used to live in… was a paradise for untamed wildebeest…

(okay, i’m sorry. i’m getting carried away here. on a stretcher)

…was a paradise for untamed wildebeest kids. It had everything. A pool. A pool table. A table tennis table. A club house. A carpentry shed. Mysterious buildings. Small factory units. A huge cemented area which I could only imagine planes landed on. Paths to walk, run, or bike around on. Obviously, a playground (or two?). Pebbles. Rocks. Boulders. Grasses. Shrubs. Trees. Quicksand. Ponds in people’s backyards with fish and frogs. Pets. And kids. LOTS of kids.

I had no idea about my family’s dire straits till 15 years after the fact. Because these things don’t matter to a six year old. That, and I thank my parents a little everyday that they didn’t let their problems touch me.

That is not to say I’m not happy now; rather, happiness is has been a continuing pursuit and ever-present umbrella goal of my waking hours — the ones where I often find myself interacting with what aren’t figments of my imagination. These entities cannot be guided through lucid dreaming, and I’m therefore forced to assume that they are indeed out of my control. Which would be great, if they weren’t for the most part dull and routined.

Anyway, ‘Onwards and Downwards’: since I could say of myself that I’m obsessed with happiness, it got me thinking (and here we are, finally, at the place where I should’ve started off): when was I the happiest?

I think it was when I was six.

When I was six, mom would try and make me take a nap at the same time as she was taking her afternoon siesta. Once she went to sleep, I would climb out of bed, wear my swimming trunks, dump my clothes in the veranda outside, and head to the swimming pool for a dip. A while later, I’d come back, wear my clothes, and head back into the house as if nothing happened.

I think I got away a few times. Sometimes, I got back to our veranda to find that a stray cat had mistaken my clothes for a lounge sofa earlier on, and shed all over them. Nevermind, clothes back on, back into the house.

Once in the house, there was still the question of getting rid of the wet trunks. Sometimes I’d head for the shower (this usually involved another change of clothes, eliminating the cat hair problem), at others, I’d just duck into the loo and slip them off, toss them into the laundry. I think I once changed out of them in the veranda itself, but ditched that idea the next time because they got dirty from the ground.

I was six, and am still a little off-centre, so I’m sure my mom caught on to my scam early enough. The day I had to stop sneaking around, I came home to find, or rather not find, my clothes on the porch. Alternativelessly, I gingerly walked into my house, hoping mommy was still asleep. She was not. She looked at me and asked where I’d been. I couldn’t believe my ears. I stared blankly at her, thinking about what I looked like — wet hair, red eyes, in nothing but swimming trunks which were now dripping all over the drawing room floor.

— Which brings me to one of the excellent reasons why six was a great year for me. My father, petrified at the thought that something bad might happen to me while I was out swimming unsupervised, took me to the pool and made me swim the length of the damn thing underwater. Repeatly. Till he was satisfied. I didn’t have to sneak around after that.

—–

I may pose this a question to a friend, when we’ve run out of small talk: “At what age were you the happiest?”

Like this:

…to borrow form from dead poets or not, is sometimes not even a consideration.

Alex was slowly beginning to realize that much about existence was optional.

First, I think he grappled with the question of whether existence itself was optional. Realising that his parents had indeed not consulted him before his mother gave birth to him, he concluded that he was created regardless of whether he wanted to be created.

Was he then like a liberated slave, who did not know what it meant to be free? What would he do now with his freedom? Hmm…, he thought. So if creation is not optional, what about destruction, and the bits between?

Destruction, or death, demise, finito, he opined was clearly constructible. It could be done. A bullet to the head oughtta do it. Even a fall off the Eiffel Tower. Alex was French. He watched too many American Sitcoms.

Constructibility, or ‘free will’, as it were, Alex felt, needed motive. Can I go from one random act to another?, he asked. Rob a liquor store one day, preach the bible another? He then asked, Can I commit an arbitrary act of suicide?

It seemed highly improbable to Alex that unconstruction could be voluntarily random. No, it would need to be motivated by something.

With this thought Alex went to sleep, bent on dreaming up the depressing, the dreary, the dark matter that drums about in the mind of the Suicidal.